The Indian car market is eagerly awaiting the launch of Mobilio, which is expected to give fierce competition to cars like Maruti Suzuki’s Ertiga and Toyota’s Innova. When it was launched in April 2012, the Ertiga sold around 7,000 units each month. Its sales have since moderated to around 5,000 cars a month at present.

“We are working on Mobilio’s pricing and once that is fixed, we will be able to fix the volumes that we want to produce,” Sen said, adding, “Estimates show that we should have bigger volumes in this segment than some of our competitors.”

Auto sector analysts, however, observed that Honda might have difficulty in servicing the kind of pick-up expected in volumes, given its current capacity. “Honda's main concern, as of now, is not having enough capacity. As per our estimates, they could easily be looking at a volume of 40,000 cars a year for the Mobilio,” said Puneet Gupta, associate director of IHS Automotive. “However, it will not be easy for Honda, as rival Maruti Suzuki will not hesitate to play the discount game with the Ertiga,” he added.